Oxford is a city full of secrets. We have winding alleyways, the historic university, pubs that can only be found if you know where to look, and a long literary tradition. Oxford is, after all, the home of Tolkien, CS Lewis, Lewis Carroll, Philip Pullman, Mick Heron, and dozens of other incredible authors, along with publishers like the five-hundred-year-old Oxford University Press.
There are stories around every corner, from bodies found in the canals, to the siege on a man’s “castle” by a group of students that ended in gunshots. The university dates back a thousand years and so much of the city’s history is worn plainly and proudly.
It was an easy decision to set a historical mystery about bookbinding here. I believe if Lilian were real and alive today, she would have these books on her reading list, given her taste for danger.
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Dorothy L Sayers, Gaudy Night
Almost all reading lists about Oxford crime or mystery fiction include this book and with good reason. It’s a classic mystery published in 1935, in which Lord Peter Whimsey and Harriet Vane investigate poison-pen letters and vandalism at Vane’s alma mater, Shrewsbury College, during Gaudy Night, an alumni celebration dinner.
The mystery and danger builds to a gripping conclusion as the perpetrator is unmasked. A classic of the mystery genre and well worth a read.
Guillermo Martinez, The Oxford Murders
First published in English is 2005, this is a twisty, clever thriller of murder and maths in Oxford. When the landlady of a young Argentine mathematician is murdered and found alongside a mathematical symbol, it’s up to him and an Oxford logician to solve the cryptic clues before the killer strikes again.
It’s a perfect blend of academia and a modern crime novel, all within the particularly special walls of Oxford. It was also turned into a movie with Elijah Wood and John Hurt.
Colin Dexter, The Wench is Dead
No list of Oxford-set crime novels would be complete without mention of Inspector Morse. Of the thirteen novels in the series, it was a toss-up for me to include this one or Last Seen Wearing, two standouts of the series.
In The Wench is Dead, we move away from the university and into the hospitals. Morse is in hospital and is given a book on a nineteenth-century murder in Oxford and becomes obsessed with the case, investigating it first from his hospital bed and then when he’s meant to be convalescing.
Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop
This novel from 1946 is pure Golden Age crime fiction. A famous poet, Richard Cadogan, takes a trip to Oxford. Late at night, with no place to stay, he stumbles into a toyshop where he discovered a dead woman. When he wakes in the supply room the next morning, he finds the toyshop is a greengrocers.
Bewildered, he enlists the help of an old friend at Oxford University to solve the mystery.
Charles Finch, The September Society
Published in 2008, this Victorian-set crime novel is a brilliant mystery set in and around the colleges. A student goes missing and his mother asks detective Charles Lenox to investigate the mystery. Things take a dark turn with the discovery of a body and a trail leads Lenox to a mysterious secret society.
Ann Swinfen, The Bookseller’s Tale
This book shows just how ancient Oxford is. Set in 1353, a young bookseller Nicholas, discovers a body floating in the River Cherwell and signs point to murder. Nicholas and his friend begin trying to unravel the mystery of the man’s death but it seems he was tangled up in a plot involving the university and the abbey, and Nicholas is suddenly on dangerous ground.
A gripping medieval mystery and the first in a series.
Simon Mason, A Killing in November
Rounding out this list is a modern crime novel published in 2022, first in the DI Wilkins series. In Mason’s series, two detectives share a surname and little else. One is from the wrong side of the tracks and the other immaculately groomed and privileged Oxford graduate. When a woman is found strangled in St Barnabas Church in Jericho, the unlikely duo investigate.
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